The Labour party must currently be thinking collective thoughts akin to the old card player’s term: Who dealt this mess anyway? More than 80% of its MPs are now formally estranged from not just the leader, but from the 40 other MPs who support him. In a cruel twist of fate, the spectre of the sainted Tony Benn hangs over the whole grim drama: he was the guru of the leftwing anti-EU position we now call Lexit, but also the man who endlessly pushed the idea that activists should have the whip hand over parliamentarians.
For all his commendable policy positions Jeremy Corbyn has been a pretty awful leader. But in all its fundamentals, the state of his party is hardly his fault. To blame him is to fall for the same delusion whereby a supposed challenger – Angela Eagle, Tom Watson, Dan Jarvis – can put the party on the road to recovery. The truth, unpalatable to some but which is surely obvious, is that Labour is in the midst of a longstanding and possibly terminal malaise, and now finds itself facing two equally unviable options.
On one side is the current leader and a small band of leftist diehards, backed by an energetic, well-drilled movement but devoid of any coherent project and out of touch with the voters who have just defied the party in their droves. On the other is a counter-revolution led by MPs who mostly failed to see this crisis coming, have very few worthwhile ideas themselves, and are a big part of the reason the Brexit revolt happened in the first place. As the activist Neal Lawson says, the choice is essentially between different captains of the Titanic, and therefore is no choice at all.
As with the centre-left parties across Europe in the same predicament, Labour is a 20th-century party adrift in a new reality. Its social foundations – the unions, heavy industry, the nonconformist church, a deference to the big state that has long evaporated – are either in deep retreat or have vanished completely. Its name embodies an attachment to the supposed glories of work that no longer chimes with insecure employment and insurgent automation.
Its culture is still far too macho, and didactic; it has a lifelong aversion to analysis and ideas that has hobbled it throughout its existence, and now leaves it lacking any real sense of what is happening. I am a lifelong party member who was raised in a Labour family – my grandfather was a south Wales coal miner, my father a Labour activist – for whom the party was a kind of secular church. But if we do not confront the crisis now, then when? Look at any number of what we still laughably call “core” Labour areas, and you will find the same things: a vote share that has been steadily declining since 2001, an MP more often parachuted in from a different world, and voters who either vote for the party thanks to fading familial loyalties (“I vote Labour because my granddad did”) or have no idea what the party stands for.
In 2014, in the former pit village of Penygraig in the Rhondda valley, I met women who said they associated Labour with “older men”; middle-aged people who still supported the party but couldn’t explain why (“I just do, that’s all”), and young people who had never voted at all. In the middle of the village was a peeling Labour club that looked like the embodiment of the decline and defeat that had become manifest after the 1980s miners’ strike.
Two years on, 53% of people in the valleys local government area (Rhondda Cynon Taf) voted for Brexit. At the last Welsh assembly elections, the Labour incumbent lost the seat to Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood – born and raised in the area, which meant a lot – who won with a majority of 3,500 votes.
The toxic side of Labour’s decline, of course, is the rise of Ukip in once solid areas from the north-east to south Wales. And here, there is much to fear. A general election may be looming. Those people on the left currently agitating for parliament to somehow nullify the referendum result ought to bear one thing in mind: that if support for Brexit was based on mistrust and downright loathing of Westminster, anything that can be presented as a parliamentary stitch-up could hugely boost Ukip’s support.
So too might the only viable way of minimising Brexit’s economic damage: joining the European Economic Area and staying in the single market (complete with the free movement of people), which would presumably allow Ukip to enrage thousands of the potential Labour switchers who fixated on immigration. There is, then, no obvious way out of this conundrum, which throws up a chilling question: do we want droves of Ukip MPs, or even Nigel Farage and his ilk serving in a coalition?
In that sense, Labour’s Westminster panic is understandable: the proximity of utter disaster and the fierce urgency of electoral politics might demand a new leader, even if that split the party. There again, with Corbynites organising a fight-back among members – and even threatening to bring more people into the party – and the prospect of big support for him from the unions, trying to topple him might also cause a fatal division. And even if the attempt to oust Corbyn succeeds, it might deliver a leader every bit as ineffective, only in a different way.
The key point is this: at the very least, the idea of Labour as a mighty, monopolistic political force is over. The party as we know it may be finished.
In either event, there are no quick answers. Any viable left politics is going to take 10 or 15 years to decisively materialise, and in the meantime the apparent atmosphere of disunity and ugliness in some places may well get worse. A new national economic crisis is surely on the way; having partly got us into this mess, George Osborne is already talking about fresh cuts.
A 21st-century progressivism will have to run deep and wide. For both the camps tearing Labour into pieces – one of whom effectively wishes it was 1945 while the other harks back to 1997 – it will require a huge shift of perspective. Otherwise they may well be left in the dust.
The left’s future will involve many Labour people, but also some in the Greens, Liberal Democrats – even one-nation Tories – and thousands of people with no affiliation at all. However it is organised, it will have to start with an understanding of the fact this is a crisis of democracy, and support a change to the electoral system and a move towards multi-party politics.
It will need to embrace the case for a federal UK (or, more realistically, a new partnership between England, Wales and Northern Ireland). Its biggest challenge will be once again uniting the people who value openness and the rich cultures of our cities, with those who now fear the same things – via, perhaps, some new deal on free movement, a programme of far-reaching economic intervention, a reinvention of our public services, and a programme of public housing to match anything accomplished in the 20th century.
God only knows what we will have to endure in the meantime. The task will be onerous, often grim, and frequently confounding. But which worthwhile endeavour was ever anything else?